When, in the year 1887, Queen Victoria reached the fiftieth year of her reign, there were none of these causes for sorrow in her realm. England was in the height of prosperity, free from the results of blighting pestilence, disastrous wars, desolating famine, or any of the horrors that steep great nations in heart-breaking sorrow. The empire was immense in extent, prosperous in all its parts, and the queen was beloved throughout her wide dominions as no monarch of England had ever been before. Thus it was a year in which the people could rejoice without a shadow to darken their joy and with warm love for their queen to make their hilarity a real instead of a simulated one. It was in far-off India, of which Victoria had been proclaimed empress ten years before, that the first note of rejoicing was heard. The 16th of February was selected as the date of the imperial festival, which was celebrated all over the land, even in Mandalay, the capital of the newly-conquered state of Upper Burmah. Europeans and natives alike took part in the ceremonies and rejoicings, which embraced banquets, plays, reviews, illuminations, the distribution of honors, the opening in honor of the empress of libraries, colleges and hospitals, and at Gwalior the cancelling of the arrears of the land-tax amounting to five million dollars. The fiftieth year of the queen's reign would be completed on the 20th of June, but in the preceding months of the year many preliminary ceremonies took place in England. Among these was a splendid reception of the queen at Birmingham, which city she visited on the 23d of March. The streets were richly decorated with flags, festoons, triumphal arches, banks of flowers, and trophies illustrating the industries of that metropolis of manufacture, while the streets were thronged with half a million of rejoicing people. A striking feature of the occasion was a semi-circle of fifteen thousand school-children, a mile long, the teachers standing behind each school-group, and a continuous strain of "God Save the Queen" hailing the royal progress along the line. On the 4th of May the queen received at Windsor Castle the representatives of the colonial governments, whose addresses showed that during her reign the colonial subjects of the empire had increased from less than 2,000,000 to more than 9,000,000 souls, the Indian subjects from 96,000,000 to 254,000,000, and those of minor dependencies from 2,000,000 to 7,000,000.